I was planning to write an incredibly long, detailed post about the not-so-wonderful world of writing for websites that operate on revenue sharing models.

Part of that post was going to discuss a throwaway article I wrote several years ago for a revshare site on a lark, just to test the waters. Due to a lucky combination of good timing, optimization for a virtually unexploited long tail keyword in a big money niche and what one can only describe as stupid luck, I’ve made approximately $600 from that article over the course of five years. It took me approximately five minutes to find the primary keyword (there’s that luck) and about ten minutes to write the simple article.

I’m not underpaid, but I generally don’t make $2,400 per hour for lousy little pen-named articles designed for content mills. I still chuckle every month when I see the mill make a deposit into my checking account.

Anyway, I wanted to mention that article because stories like those are one reason why so many people hop into the revshare world. Unfortunately, they’re flukes. Anomalies. Luck breaks. You can’t count on them. They don’t happen too often. I was going to put that particular article’s numbers up against the other four I wrote in the same week for that site long, long ago to illustrate the point.

I was plodding through the post about revenue sharing while listening to George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh and just as I started detailing the story of the miracle article, I found myself half-singing along with Ring Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy”.

It don’t come easy,
You know it don’t come easy.

It don’t come easy,
You know it don’t come easy.

Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,
And you know it don’t come easy.
You don’t have to shout or leap about,
You can even play them easy.

Well, in my case it did come easy. I goofed around as an experiment and made a big ol’ chunk of cash from writing that I’d objectively value at approximately nothing.

Some days, Starr’s lyrics do ring true for a self-employed writer.

However, there are times when it does come easy. The cosmic tumblers click into place and weird little miracles appear.

Accentuating the Positive

Instead of writing a post about the way things don’t come easy in the world of revenue sharing, I decided to write a post about the times things do come easy. I figured it might be nice to celebrate the crazy flukes and accidental victories instead of focusing on the ugly grind of making a living with a keyboard.

Here are my favorite easy moments… In no particular order:

The $600 Revshare Non-Masterpiece: This is the article mentioned above. A nearly effortless bit of experimentation continues to pay dividends years after its creation. There really is no logical explanation for why this article continues to earn and earn every month. Somehow, it continues to fly below the radars of those who work in the niche and Google, pumping out steady earnings for the content mill and me.

The Three-Page Report that Made Over $5,000. I was driving down the highway and a simple idea crossed my mind. Bum marketing (a simplified form of article-based affiliate marketing) was a hot topic in the Internet marketing world. I realized there was a very easy way to boost the value of the articles and to insure at least some up-front cash value for them. That relatively small cash payment could serve as something of an insurance policy for those who were writing free articles for directories in hopes of generating affiliate sales.

I came home, sat down and outlined the exceedingly simple process. I added introductory and concluding paragraphs, converted it into a PDF and posted it for sale as an information product on a popular IM forum with a little off-the-top-of-my-head sales copy. I set up a PayPal button and a quick automated download process for anyone willing to buy the guide. From top to bottom, it took about two hours.

The next morning, I woke up to over $2,000 in sales. Within three days, I made $5,000 off that simple idea. The almost equally awesome part was the fact that the folks who bought the report actually liked it. It didn’t take long for the concept to escape the confines of my hastily produced ebook and sales ground to a halt shortly thereafter. I wasn’t complaining.

The Luckiest Celebrity Blog Ever: I noticed that my wife was watching a TV show featuring a woman I had seen on another show the day before. Out of curiosity, I did some quick Googling and realized that her career was absolutely on fire and that she was poised for a major breakthrough.

At the time, I was experimenting with new keyword mining techniques and generating income via blogs monetized with contextual advertising. A few minutes later, I had claimed a Blogspot blog with a domain name featuring a common misspelling of the celebrity’s name and was setting it up with a number of quick posts that were little more than silly notices of other articles about the celebrity, combined with a brief excerpt of the source material and a link to the original source. It was a very crude homemade news aggregator, in a sense.

The site started making about $1 per day in Adsense earnings, so I kept adding occasional little posts. The celebrity’s star power increased to the Nth degree and earnings went up, up and up. Soon, it was making a solid $10 per day. Then $20. Then $30. I outsourced one hundred additional news aggregation-style posts with some of the earnings, loaded them up and set them to drip feed at a rate of two per week. The investment paid for itself within two months.

That site made a small fortune before people with real resources, strong content and a commitment to doing things the right way realized that a crummy little Blogspot blog was ranking in the top three for a series of high volume searches. The competition didn’t find it hard to knock me off, but that blog put a stack of fat Adsense checks in my pocket before they did. For what it’s worth, the site still generates about a buck every other day and I haven’t so much as looked at it in over two years.

Common Traits

All three of those weird winners share a few common traits:

They happened because I was willing to experiment. If I had been wholeheartedly committed to following THE plan and only THE plan, they wouldn’t have happened. This serves to remind me that keeping an open mind and trying new things can be a lot of fun and a source of profits.

They all defied duplication. Efforts to replicate the results with similar projects invariably fall short of those anomalous originals. I did have some luck with other Adsense-monetized blogs (enough that I still get a check every month from Google) and I’ve sold a few other information products here and there that have been well worth my time, but I’ve never come close on another revshare article. This reminds me that luck matters more than we’d probably like to think.

All three of these happy accidents share one other trait. They happened three or more years ago.

And You Know it Don’t Come Easy

I think that last fact may contain the most important lesson my three examples offer. In the last few years, we’ve witnessed an absolute explosion in the number of people trying to make money online as writers, Internet marketers and everything else imaginable. I think it’s an overstatement to say we’re near a saturation point, considering the web’s continued rapid growth, but the online world is certainly more crowded and competitive today than it was a few years ago.

I really do believe it was easier to mix some rudimentary knowledge with a little skill and a chunk of action to generate healthy chunks of cash back in the “good old days” (which aren’t particularly old at all, truth be told). As I think about other cool little bursts of luck I’ve had, most of them happened during or before 2008. I know I haven’t stopped experimenting with new ideas and I’d like to believe that my skills have improved. I know my knowledge base is more expansive.

So, either I’ve hit a long luckless streak or it’s getting tougher to hit the big time with little effort due to increased competition.

I wanted to go from a somewhat negative post about the doomed nature of 99.99% of revshare writing efforts to a positive reflection on the times when the money rains upon request. Instead, I think this post could still end on a somber note.

These days… Well… It don’t come easy.

Your Glory Days… And a Prize!

Ah, who wants to end on a down note? Maybe it can come easy. Even if it doesn’t, it did at some point and that’s worth a little party, right?

I open it up to you, the FWJ readership. Let’s hear your stories of glory days, your memories of times when things that shouldn’t have been successful turned into moments of accidental greatness.

Maybe it was the unedited, typo-riddled query that still landed you a plum contract. It could’ve been the time you sent off a piece of work you personally hated that the recipient loved so much you developed a profitable on-going relationship. Perhaps you had a magic revshare moment, too.

I don’t know what’s happened to you, but I have to believe you’ve had times when it all came easy.

Tell your story.

Oh, and just to encourage participation, I’ll tack on a prize. The best story wins a free copy of The Concert for Bangladesh on DVD. You get Harrison, Clapton, Preston, Dylan and even Ringo in their full bearded 1971 glory!

Let’s hear your tales of mysterious moneymakers, accidental brilliance and those unexplained moments of magic when very little effort resulted in a massive payoff of some sort.

At my last full time job, everyone used Skype to communicate as we all worked at home. My mornings usually began with a chat with my boss that went something like this:

Him: hi how ru?

Me: Fine, and you?

Him: bsy

Me: What’s on tap for today?

Him: cn u cll ur client 2 find out what hppned?

Me: Of course, I’ll get on it first thing.

Him: tnx TTYL

Me: Bye. Have a nice day.

If you ever Skype with me or if we text chat on the phone, and even on Twitter (most of the time) I won’t use text speak. It hurts my eyes to read words that aren’t really words and while I believe brevity is a talent, there’s a difference between short and sweet and deliberately shortening words to send a message.

Actually, I don’t text much, but that’s a whole different story.

Every time I go out people are walking around texting. They’re doing it in line, they’re doing it while shopping, driving, dining out, and they’re doing it while attending classes and sessions at conferences. I don’t know about you, but I find it very rude to be in conversation with someone while that same person whips out a phone and starts typing. Even though he’s not opening his mouth to speak, his attention is now focused on another person, interrupting us. I once watched a teen hold up her finger to someone at the DMV in order to get him to stop talking so she could read and respond to a text message. I looked over to see if her mother had anything to say about this display but she was also texting. Maybe they were texting each other.

However, this is about text messaging shorthand and not rude people.

Lately every time I receive an email from someone under 30 or Skype or use a similar instant messaging service, the messages are riddled with “LOLs” and “b4s” and “how r us”. It makes me crazy. Can we not type complete words when communicating online?

The local Starbucks had a sign on their chalk board recently reading” 2 Day’s 2ings.” I asked a girl behind the counter what a “2ing” is and she looked at me as if I was from a different planet. “It’s a pairing,” she said. “Cute right?” No it’s not cute. A “2ing” doesn’t even come close to being a “pairing” it looks like “twoing” which makes absolutely no sense. How much harder can it be to write out the whole word? Shortened words are anything but cute.

Full disclosure: I’ve been known to use a “2” instead of a “to” or “two” on Twitter to make a sentence work, but that’s very rare. I feel the constant use of SMS (text chat speak) makes us lazy. Creative people can find the words to fit in a short space without eliminating too many letters. And Skype and emails? There’s no reason to BRB and LOL because there’s no character count there. Why do we do this? What happened to typing out real words. Better yet, why can’t we use our voices and talk like human beings and not robots?

Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the good old days. The days before text chatting, cell phones and instant messaging. The days when only the “rich” families had more than one phone and we had to get through the day without a constant barrage of messages. If the phone rang while we were with friends, we politely told the party on the other end we were busy and would call back. We went out to dinner and communicated with our family and friends and gave them our full attention. Phone calls during dinner time or after 9:00 were only in the case of a true emergency, and by true emergency I don’t mean to discuss BFFs and FWIWs. Whatever happened to waiting until the next day to find out the gossip? There’s nothing to anticipate anymore because we receive all of our information immediately as it happens.

I don’t want to know “2day’s specials” or have to wait while someone will “brb”. Talk to me, people. Talk to me using real words and not abbreviations. I don’t want to LOL, I want to laugh. I want to have discussions where I don’t have to whip out the SMS dictionary to find out what the other person is talking about. Is that too much to ask? Am I the only person turned off by this?